> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house
As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other.
Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.
Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket.
It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.
So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.
If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."
One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.
That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays.
I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble?
I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.
> Single women are simply better catches than single men. Whether we’re talking about intelligence, looks, happiness, social skills, or health, the average single woman marrying the average single man would be “marrying down” across nearly every measurable dimension.
I'm 38 and the overwhelming majority of women I had relationships with had the maturity of a teenager well in their 30s. Barely able to take care of themselves financially, mentally, physically, let alone of a family. I seriously felt, except once, I had daughters rather than significant others.
Mind you, I might've been unlucky, but the narrative that women are more mature than men, might be true on large statistics which are quickly lost on an anecdotal level.
That you've consistently chosen immature women to have relationships with tells us nothing about the average woman. You weren't unlucky, you specifically made choices that led to these outcomes.
Had you chosen women purely randomly, it'd be a different discussion, but you hadn't.
You've done the equivalent of consistently driving above the speed limit and subsequently complaining about the police being too eager to give out speeding tickets.
>That you've consistently chosen immature women to have relationships with tells us nothing about the average woman
He's restating a complaint that's approximately as old as time. We've got records of roman male heads of household lamenting basically the same thing. He did not voice a novel or even close to novel-ish complaint.
>Had you chosen women purely randomly,
Have you met men? They're not exactly discerning except at the very tail end of the "yeah this one is worth giving a ring to" funnel. They don't necessarily have a perfect picture of what's available in the market but they're not wildly out of touch.
> He's restating a complaint that's approximately as old as time.
Heh, reminds me of:
”Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching,” attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.
A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is:
> fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers.
> Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.)
Almost all the traditional male tasks got automated or delegated away for your 30 yo male. Live in an apartment, no maintenance take the car to a mechanic if it even breaks anymore, all that’s left is work and earn money.
Important to remember many traditionally female tasks were also automated and simplified - washing machines, fridges, air fryers, dishwashers etc all reduce the time spent on those “inside the home” tasks.
yeah, so instead of stepping up around the house with this extra 'free time', they either worker longer hours at their job or relax watching tv/sports/games.
The stats are rigged and biased by not counting the types of work men do, and if they did count it they wouldn’t reach the “right” conclusions so wouldn’t be published.
And after. Women live on average 3 years longer than men, at least in the U.K.
In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension.
When this was equalised there were massive protests.
A properly thought out retirement system should reward those who have children, take care of step children or pay child support with retirement benefits based on the number of years of child care. This would give women a few extra years of retirement in line with their longer lifespan without artificially subsidizing them (child care is a form of labor that should be directly depositable in exchange for a pension).
That would align the incentives for fathers to stay with children or pay child support and for unlucky men to at least have an economic legacy that will work in exchange for their pension money, which would otherwise be worthless.
It’s sometimes difficult to find the links through Google on short notice but I found one random site that discusses this. Of course the site is pro fathers but they do link to primary sources to verify the claims in the article.
There are plenty of other places this is discussed, and I’m not associated with and haven’t ever before read the following website.
What they linked cited sources well. Quote from the original source study.
"Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework."
Obviously completely BS biased sexist study. It doesn't get more blatant than that.
When I was a kid in Florida, my sisters stayed inside learning how to knit while watching tv in the AC while I was outside in 95º Florida Humidity heat, helping my grandfather repair and maintain his home.
You mean they're perceived to not offer what it takes. Of all phenomena, hypergamy is one of the best documented. And in my experience, as inequality grows so too does hypergamy.
Meh, I’ve never met a man who was incapable of doing what it takes. It’s not rocket surgery. Just mostly don’t be a dick and treat your wife how you’d want to be treated. If there’s anything more to it please let me know (for the sake of my marriage)
The bar is not high but a shocking number of men still fail it. I’ve lost track of how many coworkers I’ve had relate some story about their “crazy” girlfriend or wife expecting sympathy and not noticing that their audience is feeling bad for her.
You are right, that's all it takes. You're lucky though to not have met a man incapable of doing what it takes. I see them all the time, being total dicks.
Not true. You can lose half your current assets easily, but possibly more.
Then you likely need to pay alimony for many years, which if you add it up might be.. pretty much the other half, depending on the situation, and maybe much more.
And that’s before talking about child support, which can be gamed, because they can argue for higher custody percentage in order to extract higher payments from you. It’s so common it’s basically routine.
We've asked you before to refrain from engaging in gender flamewar on HN. Please cease from doing this now and make an effort to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend.
When you sign a contract you have to be careful to consider how fucked you can be by the other side. It's not really the fault of that particular lady, you don't know how things will turn out.
Not every state is a 50% community property split. That's not to mention the child support, which is just wild when you see how it's calculated in most places.
As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other.
Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.